On May 12th 2010, Afriqiyah Airways Flight 8U771 crashed on approach to
Tripoli International Airport, Libya. The crash of the Airbus 330 claimed
the lives of 103 people. Only one passenger survived the crash.
The majority of the victims, 70 in all, were Dutch
nationals. Among the victims were a number of blood-relatives.
Five days after the crash, the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) was
formally requested by both the Libyan authorities and the Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to assist with the Disaster Victim Identification
(DVI) process. Bonaparte DVI was used in the screening and matching process.

In total the NFI received reference samples from (relatives of ) 84 missing
persons. No reference samples pertaining to 19 of the 33 non-Dutch national missing persons were received.

The total identification work on the Tripoli case took about 26 days. These 26 days is the time between
the arrival of the first sample and the generation of the last match report (e.g. the entire matching procedure).

Comparison

In order to clarify the speedup that can be attained using Bonaparte, we compare the following two similar cases.
The first case is an air crash in Suriname in 2008, where 19 people died. 10 of the victims were identified
using DNA, the other 9 were identified by other means (dental or fingerprints).
The second case is the Tripoli air crash as described above. The number of matches is about the square of the number
of body(part)s that need to be identified.

A relatively small accident with only 10 victims takes about two days to solve by hand. A case like the Tripoli air
crash—with ′only′ about a hundred victims—is already undoable this way. There are too many combinations
that need to be checked in order to identify all the victims. An automated identification system such as Bonaparte DVI is
indispensible in cases like this. Aside from drastically shortening the time it takes for the identification process to
be completed, it also reduces the risk of errors.